


get these left-handed lovers out of your way (they look hopeful but you, you should not stay)

by makethegirlmad



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Angst, Gen, blatant disregard for science, gravity is complicated and confusing, murph cooper is the best badass person ever, space is scary, sucky dad issues, this author knows nothing about space okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:55:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2735072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makethegirlmad/pseuds/makethegirlmad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Murphy's law' means that whatever can happen, will happen. Murph can. She will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	get these left-handed lovers out of your way (they look hopeful but you, you should not stay)

**Author's Note:**

> Just to get something clear: I HATED Interstellar. Triggered too many issues. 
> 
> This is Murph's redemption fic because I loved Murph to fucking death. 
> 
> I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT SPACE OR SCIENCE, SO, UH, IF THERE'S ANYTHING GLARINGLY INACCURATE LET ME KNOW, YEAH? AND I WILL SEND YOU A VERY NICE THANK-YOU MESSAGE. AND THEN IGNORE IT. 8D 
> 
> I do not own these characters because I am not Christopher Nolan. 
> 
> Title from the song "Please Don't Go" by Barcelona.

 

 

 

 

murph doesn't know why bad things happen, but she guesses it's usually because they have something to do with her.

she doesn't know if she's bad luck like tommy says, or just a consequence of nature and enough time given for any one event to occur, like her father says. murphy's law. a name doesn't make a thing. murph knows that, at least.

she doesn't know these things, but she is used to dealing with the unknown. ten-years-old, but this is what murph cooper knows: that time doesn't slow down for anyone, that time is the end of all things, even planets, and that her father walks on a line somewhere between eternity and the place that time goes when it stops, when it goes stale.

 

 

 

 

 

murph's mother, god rest her soul, would read her space books and make blueberry pancakes and tell her stories of forgotten times, fairytales of astronauts and spacemen and brave heroes reaching out into the dark, unknown abyss.

her mother would take her outside at night so they could see the stars. she would take murph's hand and give her a twirl, and the galaxies above would swirl like chocolate milkshakes and the corn in the field would sway in accompaniment, the silence dark and uplifting, stretching out gracefully like swan necks.

glittering night, black ink set on fire, and then her mother would collapse to the ground, murph cuddled beside her, and she'd watch as mom would point at the sky and name the constellations, touch the stars with her fingertips.

 

 

 

 

 

murph is raised by strong hands and bright eyes and a rough voice. she is raised by her father, the brilliant sun of her orbit. she is raised among men but she never becomes one.

there is a week of quiet after mom dies, like a commemoration, like some sacred ritual. her father sees her but looks too hard, too hard for a ten-year-old girl, too hard for his daughter. he buries himself in crop farming and plantation, agricultural sciences, but she always catches him looking up, up, up. he has nightmares that he can't really classify as such, because they are dreams when he's still up in the sky, flying. he misses it. he craves it. murph can tell. there is something inside him that makes him hate the world he stands on, something that makes him want to leave it; murph knows that she is the thing that tethers him here, that keeps him from floating off, so she hangs on to him, she clings.

her grandfather strokes her hair, pats her cheek, buys her textbooks on spacecraft and theoretical applications, because she asks for them at christmastime and her mom isn't there to do it anymore. they fill her shelves, physics and arithmetic dancing in her head until she looks down at her elementary-level literature book and the words are so easy, too easy, they come flowing like water.

tommy pulls at her hair and laughs at her freckles and makes fun of her name whenever she messes up, which is often. she is murph, she is bad luck.

(murphy's law only means that whatever can happen, will happen, her father reassures her. your name isn't a curse. it means possibility.

and so if she thinks one day that _my father may never come back to me,_ of course it comes true. this is her life. but also: _my father may still be alive, he may still come back to me. he loves me. he promised._

she gives each option equal weight and puts them on a scale, doesn't wait for it to balance, sets it behind her and doesn't dare look back.)

nobody takes her dancing anymore, so murph goes to see the stars by herself and recites the constellations. she remembers her mother tapping at the sky and thinks, don't worry mom one day i'll touch them, too. murphy's law means that whatever can happen, will happen. murph can. she will. 

 

 

 

 

 

for a while a poltergeist had knocked down her books, and for a while murph had thought the ghost was her mother.

anything is possible if you're named after the law that says so.

the book clatters to the floor, and murph is not afraid. ghosts, death, the great unknown, do not scare her.

(what does: her father turning his back, the way dust scrapes her skin and blows unrelentingly through the house, the way her planet collapses in deep sighs of dirt and wind. those things scare her. the tangible, the touchable. real things scare her because reality leaves less room for possibility.)

murph reaches out towards the fallen books, tries to look for some discernible pattern in their disarray. she wonders if her mom can see her. she wonders if her mom is trying to tell her something.

murph remembers: a voice that made her feel loved. cool hands on her feverish forehead. red hair, eyes as dark as her own, as dark as the sky above them. eyes that put the stars to shame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

murph reads and reads and reads until her eyes hurt, fills up multiple notebooks, binary morse alphabetize numeric or all four combined, codes and cryptology based on the titles of the books, the lettering on the spine. she tries sending messages back, rearranging her entire bookshelf, leaving notes on her dresser, tapping out words in the dark, nails hitting her headboard, words like _i miss you_ and _hi mom._

(around the third year he's gone she stops waiting for a reply, stops thinking that it's her mom, but still she believes: the ghost listens. the ghost is listening.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

her father leaves, dry dirt by the roadside, kicking up a cloud of dust, chasing his dreams and leaving her behind, and murph throws the watch he gives her to the ground because she wanted to watch it break, wanted to stop time from happening. the minute hand struggles to turn now, the hour hand doesn't move at all, and murph is fiercely glad. she places the broken gadget on her bookshelf as a reminder: if not time itself then this, at least, she can control.

(murph can. so she will.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

murph stays in her room and settles in for a long wait. her teachers call her "bright, but difficult." she flunks out of class. murph gets sent to college on dr. brand's recommendation alone. nasa takes her after a few years, and murph writes and reads and traces the stars at night. for some reason they always dance for her.

the ghost doesn't talk to her anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

she was four when her mother died, ten when her father left her, twenty when she buries her grandfather, and when murph was younger she had dreamed of touching the stars and she'd known nothing of gravity, not really, but she knew loss, she must have, because she doesn't remember not feeling it.

(baby jesse dies, too, and murph adds his name to the list. mourning is a constant process, neverending, and murph is trying to remember all the people who are still here, who are still with her, but she's coming up with blanks where faces should be.)

tommy grows older and bitter, rough hands like her father, eyes sweeping the crops and the horizon, and she thinks he has more of their mother wound up tight in him, feet planted firmly on the earth. her father had slipped past them both with wings on his back, always looking up to the sky, always longing, always searching. murph does the same, only she searches for him. tommy forgoes it altogether and keeps his eyes on the ground. murph envies him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

twenty-three years pass, and murph still dreams of constellations, of spinning galaxies and the earth collapsing beneath her feet, of her father's voice, of her father chasing stars across the deep end of the universe. she still has a ghost following her but she's learned to shove it away, to pretend it's not there.

murph was named after a law and laws are unbreakable and that is why she cannot break, will not collapse like the earth crumbling beneath her feet, the only home she's ever known. the world is ending. the dust settles in her father's wake, in the stillness, in the house, in the crops. murph stands stock-still in a sea of waving grain, the wind flapping through her clothes, dust in her eyes, thinking, _i will not bend, i will not bend._

 

 

 

 

 

murph studies the bend and curve and perfect angle of gravity. murph learns the mathematics of falling, the way dust settles in her bedroom, on her bookshelf, in her father's wake.

she thinks sometimes she can hear her father next to her, in her ear: _that's my girl._

the wind frets and trembles these days, unsettled. dr. brand pushes her and pushes her and pushes her but then pulls her back when she goes too far, and she doesn't understand why but she needs him, needs him to get her father back. he is going to help get her father back. he will help her bring him home.

(later: she will never wish more harm on anyone else in all her life.)

 

 

 

 

 

interstellar, outer space. between the spaces of the stars her mother traced there are eons of time sewn into the blackness, bending and waving and twisted around the tiny pinpricks of light. murph remembers her mother tapping her cheeks, gentle, counting her freckles, the constellations on her skin. murph remembers her mother tapping at the sky, tracing the story-pictures, listening to the galaxies sing. murph reaches her finger out and taps at the horizon, wondering. 

murph tips her head up and stares into the darkness, black ink spilling on paper. there are entire worlds unexplored out there, but she does not want them. she'll settle for saving this one. she can. she will.

 

 

 

 

 

she finds herself drawn back to when she was ten, standing in her bedroom, staring at the way the dust fell in patterns of beautiful light. her father had stared and stared and stared and finally realized, and then he packed, and then he left.

(she used to hate the ghost for that, because it was the ghost that made him leave. but it also told him to _stay._ she doesn't know what to think anymore.)

dr. brand had believed. he called it a Them.

murph had believed, too, only differently. she called it a ghost.

if there were a thing behind science. if there were a god, a higher power, something that created love and made things _happen_.

(murphy's law _means_ things happen. she forgets that sometimes. but murph believes in ghosts, not god.

there are unexplained phenomena, and god creating the wormhole is not one of them. murph works and lives and _breathes_ in possibility, and god is too outstanding an idea. just another discarded theory. just another absent father.)

she stands in front of her bookshelf and stares at the dirt settling in, the books and dust and light, gravity that had spelt out S T A Y, desperate, like a plea. she looks and looks and looks until her eyes tear with it, places her hand over her mouth, my _god,_ she says, and across time and space and through her bookshelf she thinks she hears her father answer _yeah, murph?_

 

 

 

 

 

she solves the equation, throws her papers into the air, screams "eureka!" because it's traditional, and she looks up at the sky her father is flying in, thinks of long sleepless nights and twenty-three years of video calls never received and decides, _enough, now. enough._

she saves humanity, creates a new planet, wholly habitable, and is celebrated as a messiah, earth's savior. nasa is reinstated. she changes the world.

she writes her equations over and over and over, on blackboards and whiteboards and screens and tablets and notebooks.

she bends the world in half, rolls it up and folds it gently, origamis it into a sphere again, and it's beautiful, it's so perfect, the earth bent around the sun in its orbit, the sky a brilliant circle of blue.

she reaches for the sky and finally, _finally,_ the sky reaches back.

 

 

 

 

 

years pass. the planet adjusts. gravity bends and loops and curves and meets itself in the middle and becomes _whole_ and it is the most perfect thing murph has ever seen.

she changed the world. 'murphy's law' used to mean that whatever can happen, will happen. 'murphy's law' means something different now.

 

 

 

 

 

murph wakes up one day and knows, this is not a dream:

she sees him for the first time in _years_ and _years_ (because even though she's learned to harness gravity she's never figured out how to cage time, the stream and the bend and the endless looping of it, beautiful and imperfect and uncontainable--a broken watch with a cracked screen), and he's so _young._

young eyes and an old soul, young eyes in her father's trembling, alien face, young eyes in a young body.

murph, he says, murph, i'm here now, i came back. i came back to you, like i said i would. i love you, forever.

murph sees his face, feels something click within her, and also feels something let go. let him go, a voice whispers. let him go, he cannot stay, you are not enough, you have never been enough. let him go.

she is not his little girl. she is a stranger, dying on a bed. she is the tether he had fixed himself to, all those years ago, the only reason he hasn't cut the ribbon to float off, forever.

she's torn down the old world and built a new one in its place on the foundations of her science alone, and it's still not enough for him, this world is not enough for him, but _she did not make it for him,_ and she doesn't need it to be enough for him anymore.

so she says, go. fly. go.

she doesn't say, i will die while you are gone.

she doesn't say, i will never see you again.

she doesn't say, somewhere, while you are up there, chasing the stars and far-off worlds, i will die here on earth, feet firmly planted on the ground, like tommy's were, like mom's were, like all the people you left. i wonder if you will ever think of me, in one hundred years. i wonder if you will even remember me.

 

 

 

 

 

his eyes say, are you sure.

his eyes say, i won't come back this time.

his eyes say, i'll stay if you want me to. you just have to say it. just say it.

and murph, murph thinks of a ten-year-old girl who saves the world one day, of a broken watch and a haunted bookshelf, of the day she stopped believing in ghosts.

she thinks of the word S T A Y.

murph tells him, go.

 

 

 

 

 

somewhere, a hundred years from now, her father lands on another planet. somewhere, her father embraces a woman who had chased the stars to find something new, something brighter. somewhere, he is looking up into the sun of his new world, and is laughing among the stars.

a hundred years ago, murph dies.

somewhere, sometime, across the galaxy, in a different world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

in a hundred years, a man will forget his daughter's name but will remember the law: whatever can, will.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
